No More Vietnams: A Tragic Lesson Forgotten

OP-ED

Vietnam Veteran Reflects On 'American War' Of Choice

Tens of thousands of veterans and family members visit the somber and sobering… (Getty Images )

May 23, 2014|By TOM CONDON, The Hartford Courant

I knew Arnie Holm slightly when we were growing up in southeastern Connecticut. He was a couple of years older than I, and we both caddied at the New London Country Club in Waterford. He was a big, blond, outgoing kid; a fearsome football player at Waterford High School. I wasn't surprised to learn he'd become a chopper pilot.

He was shot down and killed in 1972 in heavy jungle in Vietnam. He was listed as MIA for years. When — thanks to the efforts of friends and family — they finally found his remains and brought them back for burial at Arlington three years ago, it tied up one of the last threads to an ill-starred war that is fading fast, too fast, into history.

What a tragic fiasco, more so because we have forgotten its lesson.

The May theme for The Courant's 250th anniversary is Connecticut at war. I drew the Vietnam reminiscence by process of elimination: I am the last Vietnam veteran in the newsroom. Where have you gone, Lary Bloom, George Smith, Dennis Yonan, John Scanlan, Ron Winter and others? We are getting to be short-timers, as we used to say.

I was a draft-induced volunteer. I got a draft notice when I was a sophomore in college in 1966, when I had a student deferment. I pointed this out to the New London draft board, and they said they would wait until the day after I graduated. So warned, and despite growing misgivings about the war, I signed up for Army ROTC and went in as a military intelligence officer.

Adding richly to the experience, the draft board wouldn't take yes for an answer and tried to draft me again — twice — while I was serving in Vietnam, in the winter of 1969-70. You'd think it might have occurred to someone that drafting an Army lieutenant was somewhat redundant, but it took two letters, the second one strongly worded, to convince them.

Nonetheless, I'd bring back the draft, were it in my power, as good as today's military is. If we're going to go to war, everyone ought to have some chips on the table, not just the tiny cohort that was repeatedly sent back to Iraq and Afghanistan. If you — the nuthawks who've been pushing President Barack Obama to use force in Syria or the Crimea — think it's such a good idea, don't send somebody else's kid, send yours.

What parts of the experience never make it into the war movies? The hours and hours of sheer boredom. We attempted to impose a military solution on what was essentially a political problem. We thought we could do it by sending more troops. When I got there in October 1969, there were about 540,000 U.S. troops, and many were tripping over each other. And of course we had to build huge bases, airfields, ports and highways, in an apparent effort to win the war by turning the country into Southern California. Though it didn't make any sense, I was sort of surprised it didn't work.

I wondered then, and ever since, if it took more courage not to go than to go. There was a lot of pressure, in most of America, to follow in the footsteps of the Greatest Generation, not embarrass the family, march off (see Tim O'Brien's masterful memoir, "If I Die in a Combat Zone"). But, the war was increasingly and stridently unpopular on college campuses. My high school friend Tony Pordes was a Marine in Vietnam; his brother went to Canada. Their mother loved them both. It was a tough call.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial contains the names of more than 600 Connecticut soldiers who died in the war, including Capt. Arnold E. Holm Jr. When the memorial was dedicated in November 1982, I had a chance to chat with Maya Lin, the Yale undergraduate who designed it. She was an energetic, bubbly college kid — and a genius. She had somehow managed to capture, in one work of modern art, all of the wasted valor, mistaken assumptions, sadness and loss. People come to "the wall" still, every day, with tears and mementos.

If only the policy-makers would visit more often.

What's happened in Vietnam since the "American war" is pretty much what would have happened anyway. The country has a communist government, but it is not a satellite of Russia or China. The war's only value to America is as a bad example, of policy born of arrogance and ignorance. The second tragedy of Vietnam was that the lesson was lost, that the country blundered into a "war of choice" in Iraq while tied down in Afghanistan, sending more young men and women, not to mention countless indigenous civilians, to their graves.

There should be no wars of choice, only wars of absolute necessity. Vietnam was not that, and the passing years haven't made it so.